James Krenov; renowned furniture maker, sometime philosopher; 88

James Krenov, a renowned cabinetmaker and something of a philosopher who wrote lyrically about his craft and his reverence for the subtleties of wood, died Sept. 9 in Fort Bragg. He was 88.

His daughter Katya Krenov-Hoke confirmed the death.

A long-haired, bearded man who never stopped calling himself “a pre-Kerouac hippie,” Mr. Krenov was the founder of the fine woodworking program at the College of the Redwoods in Fort Bragg, one of the most influential programs of its kind in the country.

“Through his school and his furniture, Krenov inspired a generation of furniture makers with a high regard for both materials and craftsmanship and design with an aesthetic informed by organic, subtle details,” the Web site FineWoodworking.com said. His work is on exhibit at museums in Japan, Norway, Sweden and the United States.

Mr. Krenov's cabinets, rarely more than 4 feet high and 26 inches wide, are recognizable for their long, slim legs. On close examination, the legs reveal a variety of delicate shapes, as Mr. Krenov's knives and planes adhered to the natural contours of the wood and the patterns of its grain. He loved curves, and was known for creating door panels with concave, billowing shapes, like sails in the wind.

Evidence of the tool — perhaps a sequence of scallops across the door panels etched by his own handmade round-bottom plane — was another of Mr. Krenov's distinctive elements. The first lessons for his students at the College of the Redwoods required them to fashion their own tools.

The plane, he said, “is the cabinetmaker's violin.”

Behind the shaping and the teaching, said David Welter, the shop technician for the woodworking program, was Mr. Krenov's credo “that the work had life in it.”

“It wasn't about showing off technique as much as about having a personality in the work,” Welter said in a telephone interview. “He worked with material rather than on material; it wasn't a matter of conquering the wood. He had just a killer instinct for wood combination, the colors and textures, melding them to make works with an elegant simplicity.”

Beyond the classroom and his own cabinets, Mr. Krenov extended his influence through his writing. He wrote five books: “A Cabinetmaker's Notebook” (1976); “The Fine Art of Cabinetmaking,” (1977); “The Impractical Cabinetmaker” (1979); and “Worker in Wood” (1981), all first published by Van Nostrand Reinhold and since reprinted by Sterling; and “With Wakened Hands” (Cambium Press, 2000).

“Let us know our wood as we do our hands, and work with it in common respect and harmony,” he wrote in “The Fine Art of Cabinetmaking.”

Born Oct. 31, 1920, in a Chukchee tribal village above the Arctic Circle in Siberia, James Krenov was the only child of Dimitri and Julia Krenov. His parents — not quite aristocracy, but “people who didn't have to work,” he said in a 2004 oral history for the Smithsonian Institution — had fled St. Petersburg during the Russian Revolution. The family later made their way via Shanghai to Alaska, where Mr. Krenov's parents became teachers at an Inuit village north of Anchorage. There, young James began hand-carving toys and model boats.